Rochelle Majer Krich

Following in the footsteps of Faye Kellerman, who has 17 novels about Jewish L. A.police detective Peter Decker and his wife Rina Lazarus, is Rochelle Majer Krich (1947 — ) with her nine Jewish-themed PI novels.

Born in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1947, Krich is the daughter of Polish Jews who were interned and met after WWII. They moved to the U.S. when Krick was four to live in Washington Heights, New York. Her parents and their friends “bought a chicken farm in Lakewood, New Jersey, and we all lived together in one house. A few years later, my father sold his share of the farm, and we eventually moved to Crown Heights, in Brooklyn; then, in 1960, to Los Angeles. I still remember how awed my classmates were when I told them I was moving­ they were drooling with envy, certain that I would be meeting movie stars at the grocery market,” said Krich in an interview with Reed Andrus (http://www.rochellekrich.com/andrus.html)

“In Lakewood and Crown Heights, I attended a Jewish elementary school, and in Los Angeles, a Jewish high school. I earned my B.A. in English from Stern College. My Orthodox Jewish world was rather sheltered. I have never regretted it, not for a minute, but I think that part of my passion for reading was the vicarious enjoyment it provided me.”

“The first book I wrote was titled The Get. It dealt with an agunah, an Orthodox Jewish woman who has her civil divorce, but whose husband refuses to give her a get, the Jewish divorce, without which she can never remarry. I wrote the book because I was appalled by the terrible limbo in which agunahs find themselves, and it gave me great pleasure to ‘pull the trigger’ on this fictional recalcitrant husband. I sent out the 705-page manuscript unagented, received numerous encouraging rejection letters (a terrific oxymoron, I think), and had the good sense to immediately begin another mystery.

“The next book was Where’s Mommy Now?, and this time I found an agent (well, there was an almost-agent who extolled the book’s virtues, then two days later found a thousand things wrong with it. He offered to help me edit it, but I declined). The agent I did sign with sold Mommy for a very modest advance to Pinnacle Books (Zebra­-now Kensington), but I was deliriously happy! In the meantime I had considerably abridged The Get, and when an Avon editor phoned me at home and wondered whether I had written anything else.”